


Wintering

by black_lodge



Category: X-Men (Movies)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-30
Updated: 2013-04-30
Packaged: 2017-12-10 01:20:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,800
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/780117
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/black_lodge/pseuds/black_lodge
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"She’s been listening to old songs on the radio, and is feeling, as she usually does around the holidays, vaguely depressed and homesick. She doesn’t usually miss her old family, because they clearly didn’t want her, but during the holidays she wishes she had someone to go back to, someone who will hug her without being afraid of her skin. She hasn’t had that for a long time, not since she was a little girl, before her powers manifested. She remembers her father holding her then, her mother kissing her cheek, her brother wrestling with her on the living room rug over a newly-acquired model train. She knows those days are long gone, and there’s a bittersweet sort of sting there. She likes the cold; it takes her mind off the pain inside her head."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Wintering

It’s midwinter and Westchester is cloaked in white; has been for weeks. Rogue likes it. It’s the only time of year that she can wear her necessary protective clothing without feeling conspicuous or uncomfortable. She could go to town if she wants, but she prefers the silence of the woods behind the school. She likes being alone.

She’s been listening to old songs on the radio, and is feeling, as she usually does around the holidays, vaguely depressed and homesick. She doesn’t usually miss her old family, because they clearly didn’t want her, but during the holidays she wishes she had someone to go back to, someone who will hug her without being afraid of her skin. She hasn’t had that for a long time, not since she was a little girl, before her powers manifested. She remembers her father holding her then, her mother kissing her cheek, her brother wrestling with her on the living room rug over a newly-acquired model train. She knows those days are long gone, and there’s a bittersweet sort of sting there. She likes the cold; it takes her mind off the pain inside her head.

She knows she’s not alone. Logan’s just returned – it’s been a few days since he’s been back, and he hinted that he might stay over the holiday. He’s not done that before – he hates Christmas and holidays in general. He prefers solitude, too.

She likes spending time with him, though she doesn’t get to often. He’s back and she’s glad, but he’s been busy with the Professor, trying to piece together the bits of information he’s gathered over his two-month-long absence. She tries not to think too much about him. It hurts. She’s fairly certain he’s still after Jean. She saw her touch him in the kitchen the other night.

She still has his dog tags. She always wears them.

 

Today it’s cold and gloomy, a dismal sort of Saturday. She’s been thinking about the creek that runs in the woods behind the house, and the ice skates she has under her bed. Scott bought them for her as an early Christmas present. Rogue has never ice skated before.

Today there’s nothing scheduled. There have been no attacks for weeks now, nothing that seriously needs the X-men’s attention. She has no prior obligations. Kitty and Bobby and Jubes and Remy have eaten lunch and are watching a film on TV, and she slips out of the house, unnoticed.

Against the house is a pile of newly-chopped wood – Logan’s work. He told her that the best time for cutting wood is winter, when the sap in the trees has sunken down in the trunk, and the wood splits easily with a single blow. She asked if he used his claws, and he laughed and said it’d be like trying to cut down a tree with one of ‘Ro’s kitchen knives. He used a maul.

The snow is deep, but her boots are high and she is warmed by the exertion. She can see her breath on the air. The woods are stark and dead, the trees like jagged, blackened bones jutting out of the cape of snow. She reaches the creek before long, a track of shining iron cutting a rift through the earth.

She sits down on the snow-covered bank and laces on her skates. She steps onto the ice and wobbles a bit before falling. She has bruised her knee through her jeans, but it’s fine; she gets up and tries again.

She is shaky, and falls several more times, but she is doing well on her own. Soon she’s gliding down the creek as easy as anything, cheeks red and mouth split into a smile. Her eyes don’t sparkle in the watery winter light, but she is enjoying herself, and the silence of the afternoon. Soon she’s sweating beneath her layers of clothing; patches of damp beneath her arms and in the crooks of her elbows. The blades of her skates snarl on the ice. Her breath comes fast and white.

The creek is wide and flat, and here it cuts through a hill, and the banks grow higher, until they rise some feet above her head. A tree has fallen here, and she glides beneath its ice-laced arc. The fir trees on either bank are heavy with snow, dark and cold beneath. When the banks shrink again, she can see small hoof prints at the shore, the sign of deer.

She’s flying now, straight down the center of the creek. She doesn’t notice the black ice. She doesn’t know that it’s rotted, that the last snowfall thawed the middle just enough to bend critically beneath her slight weight. And she doesn’t know that when she decides to try skating backwards, the consequent fall and impact of her knees will be just enough to spiderweb the ice and plunge her into the rushing creek below.

She flails, accomplishing little more than completely drenching herself in icy, midwinter water. Breath stolen by the chill, she can’t even scream. She loses her hat. Her skates fill with water, dragging her down. She kicks, but she can’t find the bottom. She wasn’t aware that the creek was so deep.

The cold begins to numb her, and her joints stiffen. Her mind blazes with panic, and the voices of the people whose powers she’s assimilated suddenly roar up within her mind. She cries out in agony.

A welcome voice suddenly comes to her out of the torrent of foreign emotions and memories. Logan – Logan is speaking to her, and she suddenly remembers a similar scene – long ago, when he’d first made his escape from the experimentation facility, staggering across frozen Canada, he’s stumbled into a frozen stream. He’d broken through instantly – his metal skeleton wasn’t light by any means – and he’d barely managed to escape. But he had, and she remembers.

She tries to calm herself; she can do this. She stops thrashing, and tries getting a grip on the ice around her. It cracks, breaks away, and she keeps breaking it away until it gets thick enough to remain intact when she hammers on it. All the while she weakens steadily; she can no longer feel her fingers and toes, and it terrifies her. You can lose fingers and toes to frostbite, she knows. She tries not to think about it.

Now she tries pulling herself out of the hole. Her soaked gloves scrabble at the ice, and for a few brief, terrible seconds she imagines herself slipping into the bitter waters – but she pushes that thought away, remembering her months of training with the X-men, and with a grunt, hefts her sodden weight up out of the freezing water and onto the ice.

She lies there for a minutes, panting, convulsing with shivers, teeth chattering too much for her to control. Now that she is out, she realizes that she doesn’t recognize this part of the woods at all. She is very far from the Academy. Sure, she just has to follow the creek back up the way she’d come, but she’s been out for – well – more than an hour on the creek, in any case. Now she is drenched and trembling with cold, and it is getting dark. Thank God she didn’t lose her skates; she can’t imagine walking back in her socks.

She’s apprehensive about getting on the ice again, but realizes that walking isn’t an option. She can’t walk on her skates, and she’s not about to take them off. She hobbles downstream until she finds what looks like a safe spot, and gets back on the ice. She then begins the long, freezing journey back.

 

It’s dark by the time she reaches the place she left her shoes. By a stroke of luck she doesn’t miss them. She hops off the ice, by this time quite numb with cold, and, with fumbling fingers, manages to slip her frozen feet into her boots. She can’t see the house from here, but she refuses to let herself panic – it’s just through these woods, up the hill, across the broad field, and up another hill. And she should see lights from the field, she knew. All she has to do is walk.

But it’s dark, and she’s cold, and it’s slow going in her sodden clothes up the snow-capped hill. Her lungs are on fire; each breath is a blue flame in her raw throat. Her mouth is dry and her stomach draws emptily in on itself. Above all is the chill – she knows she’ll be ill after this is over, and for the first time, she curses her clumsiness and wishes she’d mentioned to someone where she was going. Not halfway up the second hill she stops to take a breather – just a moment, she tells herself; not long at all; she’d pause to catch her breath, rub her hands together, puff on her cold fingertips, and then she’d continue on her way.

She sits down, and this is what nearly kills her.

A weariness borne of total physical exhaustion and augmented by the arctic temperature overcomes her, and she soon nods off, knees pulled up to her chest, spine curving against the rigid trunk of an oak, face buried in her still-wet sleeves. Her breathing slows, the small bursts of white breath coming more and more infrequently, until at last they are little more than an occasional, momentary blur on her blue lips. Her eyelids drift shut, and soon she has fallen into a precarious slumber, dreamless and dark and empty.

 

It’s not very long before they come through the woods, but it’s been long enough. He calls for her, but she doesn’t hear his voice, and if she could, she would imagine how strange it is that he would bother, when her tracks are clearly visible in the pale white snow and he can scent her out as easily as he can follow those tracks. She doesn’t wake when he finds her – nor does she stir when he crashes into the snow before her, saying her name, heedless of who else could hear – but they’re all still on the other side of the field, nowhere near.

His hands flutter anxiously over her still form, then reach to unwrap her arms from around her knees. He brushes his gloved hands over her frozen hair and just barely grazes her paraffin-pale cheeks with his fingertips. He can hear her heartbeat, and that relieves him, but it is a fleeting, delicate kind of relief.

Momentarily Bobby joins him, so accustomed to the cold that he treads through the snow in bare feet. Logan turns on him and snarls and the boy stumbles back, but retains enough presence of mind to stop the older man from removing his gloves – “Don’t; she doesn’t need more of you in her head than she’s already got – ”

She doesn’t wake even as he carefully slips his arms beneath her knees and her back and lifts her. She doesn’t remember the walk back up the hill, nor how the others greet them in the field, anxious eyes and mouths agape, their exclamations limited to reverent whispers that alight in the frigid air like ghostly butterflies, fluttering their pallid wings a moment before fading away. He snarls at them, and they walk in silence alongside him until they reach the school, whereupon they disperse to their rooms in clusters, discussing in hushed tones the young girl’s recklessness and the older man’s foul temper and obvious disquiet.

And though he has never voluntarily set foot in the place, Logan takes her to Jean Grey’s infirmary, where the anxious doctor receives her student. She attempts to get rid of him, but he refuses to leave, stubbornly remaining by the girl’s side until he nervously and unthinkingly lights a cigar and Jeans removes him by force.

\---------------------------

What she remembers is this:

Waking up in her still, quiet room to a faded morning light trickling in through the crack in the dark curtains, the smell of cigar smoke prevalent in the air, and the warmth of another body resting near. She opens her eyes to find Logan slumped over her bed, head pillowed from elbows resting not far from her own, faintly purpled eyelids shut against the invasive light.

His eyes snap open as he detects a change in her breathing. Then, quicker than she can blink, he sits up in the chair he’d brought to her bedside, raking his hands through his hair before tentatively reaching out to touch her. She’s too drowsy to shy away, and besides, she knows she can’t really hurt him if he’s careful. And he is careful: he gently brushes her shock of white hair back behind her ear, and as he lets his fingertips drift down her cheek, she realizes he’s wearing gloves.

“Mornin’, sugar,” she whispers, and his gaze darts up at that, slightly startled. “What’re you doing?”

She wishes immediately that she’d left it at “Mornin’, sugar,” for no sooner does the question mark leave her lips does he withdraws from her completely. “You’re awake,” he says, and she smirks a little at that, too tired to manage a full smile.

“I see that,” she says, and with some effort, she lifts her hand (bare, she noted with a momentarily thrill of fear) and places it on his flannel-clad arm. “I’m still tired, though,” she says, squeezing his forearm softly.

“You can go back to sleep,” he says. “Jeannie wants you to sleep as much as possible – doesn’t want pneumonia to set in. You got a bad cold anyway.”

She blinks, recognizes the burn in her lungs and throat as proof. How long has she been asleep?

Logan checks his watch. “It’s seven o’clock now,” he says. “Figured you’d sleep a bit later than that; it was ten-ish when we brought you in last night, and you were froze pretty bad. Nearly got yourself in a shitload of trouble, Marie.”

She smiles blissfully despite his reproving tone.

“It ain’t funny,” he growls, shifting restlessly in his chair. “What were you thinking, going off into the woods alone? Playin’ on the ice in the middle of the night? Coulda got yourself killed, Marie, and you know I didn’t pick you up offa that road just to see you freeze yourself later.”

This is new – she has never heard him talk about that before. They have never really discussed that first time in Canada, and she has always put it down to the fact that she isn’t the type of girl to look a gift-horse in the mouth, so to speak.

But now, she feels, is a good time to ask. She knows him well enough by now to expect a straight answer if she asks, and she knows he’ll understand her asking. Thus, she speaks up.

“Logan?”

“What?” Were he another person, that tone could be called ungracious, but she isn’t bothered.

“Why’re you sticking around?”

He blinks at that, settles back in his chair somewhat. “Whaddya mean?”

Rogue yawns, shifting to her back and letting her arms drift upward above her head. Her shirt sleeves draw back as she stretches, revealing the pale stretches of her forearms. “I met you in a bar in Canada,” she murmurs. “You were fightin’. You looked like you were good at it. Why’d you never go back? I always figured – I mean, don’t get me wrong, I like you bein’ around – but I always had you figured for a loner.”

“What makes you think I wanna go back, Marie?” he says quietly. “That life was hell. I beat the shit outta other guys to keep from havin’ to think about my _own_ shit. I like bein’ far away from that as possible.”

Rogue thinks about that for a moment. “Okay,” she says dubiously. “But aren’t you trying to find out about your past now? What made you want to start thinking about it again?”

Logan studies his hands for a moment before looking up at her. “I guess it’s probably ‘cause I’ve got something to look forward to now,” he says slowly. “The future’s lookin’ good for once, and I’m not so afraid of who or what’s gonna pop up outta my past. It’s easier to look back when you got someone guidin’ you forward, you know?”

She doesn’t, but she’s not going to question further now, at least, not when her skull feels stuffed with raw cotton and her mouth is cracking like a drying mud puddle. So instead she yawns, and says, “You’ll stay with me, right?”

“Always, kid.”

She smiles sleepily. “Promise?”

“Swear to God.” He leans forward, roughly cups her face in his gloved hands, and presses a kiss to her hair.

She sighs gently and falls asleep again.

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted June 2007 on LJ, primarily as an exercise in prose.


End file.
